For John Ross, nothing less than total emersion is enough. Reporting is a way of life, not a job, and intrinsic to that is taking sides – on the side of truth and against power. A good reporter is a partisan who, he asserts, “makes people angry, encourages organization, offers them hope that another world is possible."
Bolivian President Evo Morales lost the referendum last Sunday that could have given him the ability to run for re-election in 2019. The margin was small, but the implications are huge: Bolivia’s longest standing and most popular president finally has an end date for his time in power, on January 22, 2020. The Bolivian left and its vibrant social and indigenous movements were always bigger than Morales, and Sunday’s referendum results underline this.
Benjamin Dangl is the editor of Toward Freedom. He has worked as a journalist throughout Latin America for over a decade, and is the author, most recently, of Dancing with Dynamite: Social Movements and States in Latin America (AK Press). He teaches journalism at Champlain College and is a doctoral candidate in Latin American history at McGill University.
Below are the collected articles Dangl has written for Toward Freedom:
After Empowering the 1% and Impoverishing Millions, IMF Admits Neoliberalism a Failure
At the February 11 Democratic Debate, Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton had a spirited exchange about an unlikely topic: the 92-year old former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Sanders berated Clinton for saying that she appreciated the foreign policy mentoring she got from Henry Kissinger. “I happen to believe,” said Sanders, “that Henry Kissinger was one of the most destructive secretaries of state in the modern history of this country.”
In 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded, killing 11 workers and setting off the worst oil spill in US history. The images are unforgettable: The Gulf of Mexico on fire. Pelicans emerging from the water entirely covered in thick, black oil. Planes flying overhead, spraying more than a million gallons of an oil-dispersing chemical called Corexit in an attempt to control the spill.
As the debate over the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement continues, many Americans are unaware that hundreds of exploitative foreign trade zones are already entrenched within the US, and most likely in their own part of the country.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019